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Playing an Internet Radio Station with "hidden" URL with MB
Author: VX Music Bee has great utility for listening to Internet Radio Stations. It offers some unique features which are hard to find even in dedicated applications for Internet Radio listening. For example, if a radio station informs about currently played song, MB is able to find the cover and lyrics automatically. I like the feature very much. The procedure for adding a new radio station to MB is very simple: 1. Go to MB Library on the left sidebar, find Radio Stations button and press it. 2. Right-click on the middle pane and choose "New Station". You will see a few empty fields to fill in (e.g. Name of the Station, Genre, Description...). However, the most important field is Station URL. Usually all the required data can be found on the website of the station. 3. The problem is that lots of popular radio stations (including BBC) "hide" the URL for users to listen to it on the website only. There are many ways to obtain the hidden URL. Sometimes you can find a website or a forum topic (especially on Linux forums) which presents all the Stations URL from the country, network, genre etc. The example website with URL's of Radio Stations from the UK http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/wmp.asp. All you need is to copy the link, paste it to MB Station URL field (sometimes "http://" needs to be removed), fill in the required fields, save the changes and enjoy your listening with MB. I'd call the solution described above as standard and "conventional". And now I'll show you the "unconventional" way to get the URLs (including hidden ones) for more than 15 000 Internet Radio Stations from around the world. There is no need for searching forums or websites as all the data required to add a new radio station to MB will be stored in your system. All you need is to go to the website http://www.raimersoft.com/tapinradio.aspx, download and install the application. I think the software is currently the best available freeware for Internet Radio listening. I highly recommend it, but hope that some of its useful features would be implemented in MB Radio Station utility in the future. Those of users who don't need instant access to about 15 000 radio stations at once and want to listen only the few chosen ones with MB could use the huge Tapin Radio database to find favourite radio stations and listen to with Music Bee. Just find the desired station (using build in search box or Presets) and play it with Tapin Radio. While playing right-click on the "Information" field, choose "Clipboard> Radio Station URL" and the URL was copied to the clipboard. Now that you have desired URL follow the standard procedure described above (paste the URL from the clipboard) to add it as a New Station to Music Bee. Simple enough. And last but not least: Remember to press Save button when finished. Finding the stream URL using Chrome Dev Tools or Firebug Using Google Chrome's built-in developer tools, or the Mozilla Firefox equivalent, Firebug, you can also find the mp3 stream url. The procedure below is for Google Chrome, but it should be similar in Firefox # Open the page where the player is located. # Press F12 to open the developer tools # Open the 'Network' tab in the developer tools window # Refresh the page # Start the stream # Now, look in the developer console to find the mp3 stream, it will most likely be the largest file (tip: sort by size), and the longest running process. # Then, right click the path and press 'copy link' # Paste this link in the MusicBee New Radio Station box and happy listening! Category:Guides